Build It: Extreme Personal Video Recorder

The living room PC experience is what some marketers refer to as a “sit-back” experience, meaning you’re sitting on your couch or Barkalounger, and not at a desk. The result is that you want a keyboard and mouse to accommodate this computing style, and we think we’ve found it.

Keyboard/Mouse: A company called Gyration makes a USB RF keyboard/mouse combination that features a light, laptop-sized keyboard (with full sized-keys), and a mouse with a gyroscopic sensor in it. The mouse arrives with NiMH rechargeable batteries along with a recharger. Battery life was pretty good, and the unit could go several days between recharges. We really liked the well-designed recharger cradle, where you rest the mouse so it’s always charged. The keyboard runs on four AAA batteries, but unfortunately does not have any way to connect to the recharger.

Both have a 25-foot range, and the mouse in particular is a joy to use in a living room setting. ATI’s Remote Wonder, a remote control included with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro, has good mouse functionality, but we found that Gyration’s mouse navigates the Windows UI much faster.

It operates as a garden-variety optical wheel-mouse, but you can also pick it up, and underneath it is a trigger you press with your index finger. A gyroscope inside translates movement through the air into mouse movements, which moves the pointer on the screen. It is surprisingly intuitive, and requires all of about two minutes to learn.

Diamond Electronics came out with a prior version of Gyration’s mouse a few years ago, but it was very difficult to use. This new model improves on the older one in just about every way. It’s one of the very best living-room PC pointing devices we’ve found, and should be an integral part of any PC that’s going to live in your living room.

Remote Control: We considered adding the IR-based StreamZap to the mix of components here, but ATI’s Remote Wonder gets the job done quite well, particularly with our current TV watching/recording app of choice, ShowShifter (more on that on the next page). And because ATI’s remote is RF, it has a very long range. It will even drive a PC located in another room in your house. The range is so good in fact that ATI has implemented a channel-selection feature, where you can assign a Remote Wonder to talk to a specific PC on one channel, and one channel only, so that if you have a second Remote Wonder, it won’t interfere with the first and the PC that the first remote controls.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2016 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.